Shehata 1

Ahmed Shehata
UWRT 1102
Instructor: Fran Voltz
Sept 15, 2014

Journal Entry#2: Outfoxed

The movie outfoxed was clearly bias against Fox News and its owner. It depicted fox
news as a conservative far right leaning organization, with its own political agenda, this was
accomplished through interviews with pervious disgruntle employees.
The movie purposely portrays the slanted techniques used by fox news. These techniques include
cutting people off, saying some people say and shut up as demonstrated by their star reporter
Bill OReilly. The movie showed clips of reporters using these techniques as examples of ways
of being vague and not specific. These techniques can also be used to insert political opinion.
Other techniques widely used by fox news reporters in interviewers was calmly say we
have to cut you off and thank you for your time. Bill OReilly uses these techniques and is
often caught saying shut up on fox news and on his show the OReilly Factor. Why does fox
news do this on air? Is it because they are worried what people are going to say. Are they trying
influence the audience or are they trying to show that there many sides to a story. Why do they
care? Fox is supposed to be reporting the news, it should be unbiased and straight forward. It
should not include their opinion or agendas.
Outfoxed does an excellent job of diagnosing why people talk so much about the Fox
News network. For while Fox has some of the highest ratings of any of the news networks, it is
also commonly criticized for its not so "fair and balanced" programming. It is chronicled in this

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film how Fox succeeds in bringing in the viewers the same way that best-selling polemics and
political talk radio do, they serve up to their audience heroes and villains. This method is so
effective because the major issues facing this country and the world are generally very
complicated, and require a reasonable amount of background information in order to make a
sober judgments. However, most people have neither the time, nor the inclination for anything
like that. Most do not follow politics to learn, to be challenged, or to take action, they simply
want to feed their outrage. If their anger about the world around them can be explained away by
blaming the people they already have ideological differences with, well that's just awesome. So,
they often take refuge in the consistent, simplified, outrage-inducing commentary of their oh-so
familiar talking heads. This, to me is the essence of Fox News. From its on-air discussion groups,
to its choice of stories, as well as its evening talk shows, it is all about spoon-feeding people with
stories of heroic conservatives, fighting to strengthen America against its enemies, both foreign
(terrorists) and domestic (liberals). The film demonstrates how Fox news achieves this through a
steady feed of news reporting that is highly regulated, intentionally biased, and aligned around a
predetermined ideological slant.
As far as I'm concerned, to explain the behavior of Fox News by saying that it is simply
"standing up for the conservative perspective in a sea of mainstream media liberalism" as many
conservatives do, is highly misleading. I believe one can rightfully stand up for any perspective
they want, just so long as they aren't forced to resort to dishonest, intentionally biased reporting
in order to make or bolster their case. In Outfoxed, director Robert Greenwald makes a very
compelling case that Fox News, in the interests of carving out that niche for itself, does that far
more than the other news networks?

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It is evident that outfoxed choose certain memos to show fox news in a bad light. They
choose many memos but one specific memo stood out to me which stated that marines should be
called sharpshooters and not snipers because its a negatively charged word. Another memo that
outfoxed used to illustrated fox news bias, is the memo that compares the atrocity of the Abu
Ghraib prison with those of the American captives of the Taliban. Fox news asked why we are
not focusing the treatment of the American prisoners over the treatment of the insurgents of Abu
Ghraib.
Outfoxed plays up there biased against fox news by playing spooky music throughout the
movie and incorporating scary text as well. This is intended to make fox news appear scary to the
viewer. As I watched this movie I noticed that this strategy that outfoxed used, worked for me
and discouraged me to ever watch fox news, even though I never have.
Overall I think this film was very biased against fox news. Historical journalist are
supposed to be unbiased and report only the news as it happen. However this does not seen to be
the case with certain news programs and stations, since it is exposing the methods of a successful
conservative organization, the conservatives who hear of Outfoxed will most likely write it off as
nothing more than liberal propaganda. That to me is the ultimate problem with the polarized
American political scene. Just about anyone who would be interested in the subject matter of this
film as politically oriented as it is, has probably already made up their mind about Fox News one
way or the other.